<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/23/ellen-brown-banking-crisis-3-0-time-to-change-the-rules-of-the-game/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ellen Brown">Banking Crisis 3.0: Time to Change the Rules of the Game</a> <bq>[...] advances will be made to “eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.” “Valued at par” means that banks can hold their long-term federal securities to maturity while acquiring ready cash against them to meet withdrawals, without having to “mark to market” and sell at a loss.</bq> Nice for banks, right?!? But how many people were forced to sell their homes at underwater prices because they needed the money? There's no system for them where the Fed backstops their liquidity requirements? Is it because the Fed doesn't believe they'll ever pay it back, but believe that the bank can? Hell, the house has enough equity, too. It's just the timing of the sale is not fortuitous---just like for the bank and its bonds. <bq>Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. <b>Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt.</b></bq> <bq>What constituted a radical departure from capitalist principles in the last financial crisis was not “nationalization” but an unprecedented wave of bank bailouts, sometimes called “welfare for the rich.” The taxpayers bore the losses while the culpable management not only escaped civil and criminal penalties but made off with record bonuses. <b>Banks backed by an army of lobbyists succeeded in getting laws changed so that what was formerly criminal behavior became legal.</b></bq> <bq>Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses? If so, then <b>why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-23/the-sec-is-coming-for-coinbase" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">The SEC Is Coming for Coinbase</a> <bq>On the other hand I think that the SEC’s response is straightforward and obvious: There absolutely are existing, reasonably clear rules about how you register securities. Yes, you’re right, <b>it’s impossible for crypto tokens to follow those rules. Oh well! Guess that means crypto exchanges are illegal.</b></bq> <bq>The position of Coinbase — and of the crypto industry more broadly — is “look, SEC, if you want to have a flourishing system of legally compliant, safe, trustworthy crypto assets, you will need to work with us a little bit to write new rules,” and <b>the position of the SEC is “no, we don’t want that, we want all of you to go away forever.”</b></bq> <bq>[...] too many of those smart young people are under indictment or giving interviews from undisclosed locations; too much customer money is gone. If you run a crypto exchange and you want to set up a meeting with regulators to talk about how to write regulations to prevent a repeat of the recent crypto collapses, they will not trust you, because that is what FTX was saying too . <b>There is not much goodwill left.</b></bq> <bq>Crypto founders are rich and popular and criticize you on Twitter and get a lot of likes and retweets. <b>Your own regulatory employees, who have an eye on their next private-sector jobs, want to be leaders in crypto innovation rather than just banning everything.</b> When crypto is going down and so many projects are evaporating in fraud and bankruptcy, you can kind of say “I told you so.” There is just a lot more appetite to regulate, or I guess just to shut everything down. <b>“You are stifling innovation,” the indicted founder of a bankrupt crypto firm can say, but nobody cares.</b></bq> <bq>The SEC’s four least favorite words might be “especially with a VPN.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-road-to-auto-debt/" source="N+1" author="Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross">The Road to Auto Debt </a> <bq>They end up “upside down” on their loans, meaning that they owe more for the car than it’s worth—and so they fold the balance into another loan for a new vehicle. (In 2020, a whopping 44 percent of all traded-in vehicles were carrying negative equity.) Lenders show little leniency if they fall behind on payments. Indeed, <b>many expect borrowers to default, and so repossession is invariably the next step, allowing dealers to sell the car to the next sap.</b></bq> <bq>[...] lenders are hardly motivated by a gallant desire to help the downtrodden. They are in business because the demographic in question is the easiest to exploit, with high profit margins guaranteed. <b>As with other debt classes, poorer households end up paying much more for cars, auto loans, and vehicle insurance than they should.</b></bq> <bq>Auto dealers and lenders commit fraud on a routine basis; by the estimate of one former car dealer, <b>65 percent of auto loans involved deceptive and predatory practices.</b> But they are much less likely to end up behind bars than those to whom they peddle cars through their con games and high-pressure sale tactics.</bq> <bq>If debtors fail to respond to an order to appear, they are found to be in civil contempt, and an arrest warrant can follow. Those who end up in jail are required to post a bond that typically corresponds to the amount of the debt. <b>Though technically arrested for contempt, in effect, they are behind bars for a debt they cannot pay.</b></bq> <bq>While only a minority of these judgments result in jail time, <b>the threat of incarceration is an extremely effective way of forcing debtors to seek out funds to make their payments, indirectly encouraging actual criminal activity.</b> The consumers whom predatory lenders choose to target have the least resources and yet they are burned the most. By contrast, auto buyers who can afford to pay upfront or secure cheap loans have the smoothest ride.</bq> <bq>[...] this is the natural outcome of a creditocracy, where indebtedness becomes the precondition not just for material improvements in the quality of life, but for the basic requirements of life: where one in three Americans with a credit record are pursued by debt collectors; 14 where fear of a damaged credit score governs our conduct; and where <b>the ideal citizens are “revolvers,” who fail to make monthly payments and resort to rolling over their debts, with penalties, ensuring they are kept on the hook as revenue-generators indefinitely.</b></bq> <bq>The result is <b>a rolling feast of revenue for creditors in each of these sectors</b>, with the full force of the courts to back up the extraction of profit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/22/banking-crisis-2023-deep-origins-and-future-directions/" source="CounterPunch" author="Jack Rasmus">Banking Crisis 2023: Deep Origins and Future Directions</a> <bq><b>The Fed and central banks’ solution to periodic banking instability in the short run is the problem creating that same instability in the longer run.</b> But some capitalists get incredibly rich and richer in the process. So the excess liquidity shell game is allowed to continue. The political elites make sure the central banks’ goose keeps laying the free money golden eggs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-21/jpmorgan-had-some-fake-nickel" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">JPMorgan Had Some Fake Nickel</a> <bq><b>The system is that there are certain warehouses affiliated with the LME that store a certain amount of nickel on behalf of nickel futures traders, and “delivery” of nickel when a contract expires consists of changing the ownership of some of the nickel in one of the warehouses.</b> If I own nickel in an LME warehouse and sell a futures contract, and you buy the contract, and you let it expire and take delivery of the nickel, what you actually get is a little notation — called a “warrant” — saying that now you own the nickel in the warehouse.</bq> <bq>It is primarily a financial market, not an industrial one; if you get a warrant on LME warehouse nickel you are probably not going to go to the warehouse immediately to take possession of your nickel and turn it into cars or batteries. <b>Like Yap money stones , the warehouse nickel is still useful for financial trading even if it is not actually there , or not actually nickel.</b></bq> <bq>[...] if you thought there was a 30% chance of an uncontrolled failure, you probably took decisive steps to end it over the weekend, which means there was a 70% chance you were wrong. <b>Not a risk you wanted to take, as a bank regulator, but maybe one the shareholders would have been willing to take.</b></bq> You just proved that there should be no private banks. <bq>Its Middle Eastern shareholders were also incensed. “<b>You make fun of dictatorships and then you can change the law over the weekend.</b> What’s the difference between Saudi Arabia and Switzerland now? It’s really bad,” says one person close to one of the three major shareholders.</bq> This is absolutely not what happened. It's just that no-one read the AT1 contracts when they signed them. <bq>Aside from the sense of shame brought on by the bank’s collapse, <b>legal observers say these three surprises raise some fundamental questions about the primacy of Swiss banking law</b> and also sows doubt with foreign investors about putting money in the country.</bq> <bq>I guess. One can always find fault with these rescues, in part due to fog-of-war and hard-to-prove-the-counterfactual reasons and in part because, you know, why wouldn’t people panic in a crisis. But to me, <b>the Credit Suisse rescue looks more or less like the standard playbook.</b> Which doesn’t mean that it followed the rules and upheld the rule of law. That’s not how these things generally go.</bq> Lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking on this. <bq>[...] the Swiss regulators’ insistence that Credit Suisse was well capitalized both last week (when they were trying to calm markets) and this week (when they don’t want to leave UBS with a giant capital hole) makes it harder for them to argue that the AT1s needed to be triggered. <b>There is a real tension between the standard regulatory responses of (1) insisting that everything is fine and also (2) taking drastic emergency actions.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-20/ubs-got-credit-suisse-for-almost-nothing" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">UBS Got Credit Suisse for Almost Nothing</a> <bq>One way to put this is that the market thought the stock was worth 20% of its book value. But another, more useful way to put it is that the market thought that the assets were worth 93.2% of their book value: Credit Suisse’s CHF 486 billion of liabilities were real enough, so if the market priced the equity at CHF 9 billion then that implicitly meant that it valued the assets at about CHF 495 billion. <b>The market thought that the reported asset value was off by 6.8%. But if the reported asset value was instead off by 8.5%, the stock would be worthless. The cushion was very very thin.</b></bq> <bq>Credit Suisse is not worth $3 billion; it is worth half a trillion dollars, more or less. It's just that virtually all of that value — more than 99% of it — belongs to its creditors. <b>UBS will take over Credit Suisse’s hundreds of billions of assets and use them to pay Credit Suisse’s hundreds of billions of liabilities, and there's the tiniest sliver — about $3 billion — left for its shareholders.</b> That $3 billion is pretty much rounding error on the value of Credit Suisse; it could just as well have been $5 billion, or $1 billion, or a Toblerone bar. <b>The value and mechanics of this deal don’t depend that much on the price for the equity, as you can tell by the fact that UBS tripled that price in the course of a few hours.</b></bq> <bq>In particular, investors seem to think that AT1s are senior to equity, and that the common stock needs to go to zero before the AT1s suffer any losses. But this is not quite right. You can tell because <b>the whole point of the AT1s is that they go to zero if the common equity tier 1 capital ratio falls below 7%.</b></bq> <bq>The point of this AT1 is that if the bank has too little equity (but not zero!), the AT1 gets zeroed to rebuild equity! That's why Credit Suisse issued it, it’s why regulators wanted it, and it would be weird not to use it here. Oh, fine, I understand the position a little. The position is “bonds are senior to stock.” <b>The AT1s are bonds, so people bought them expecting them to get paid ahead of the stock in every scenario. They ignored the fact that it was crystal clear from the terms of the AT1 contract and even from the name that there were scenarios where the stock would have value and the AT1s would get zeroed, because they had the simple heuristic that bonds are always senior to stock.</b> That's the trick! The trick of the AT1s — the reason that banks and regulators like them — is that they are equity, and they say they are equity, and they are totally clear and transparent about how they work, but investors assume that they are bonds. <b>You go to investors and say “would you like to buy a bond that goes to zero before the common stock does” and the investors say “sure I’d love to buy a bond, that could never go to zero before the common stock does,” and the bank benefits from the misunderstanding.</b></bq> <bq><b>If you have $1.5 billion, you can’t buy a $500 billion bank, even if its equity value is only $1.5 billion.</b> You need the capital and financial capacity to handle its $500 billion of assets.</bq> <bq>I used to sell options for a living, and the lesson I took away from that is that <b>almost nobody who thinks they should be buying options is right.</b> In any case though a $500,000 three-month Bitcoin call option is effectively free.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-17/big-banks-trust-first-republic-with-their-money" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Big Banks Trust First Republic With Their Money</a> <bq>[...] it is an unstable equilibrium. <b>If people stop believing it, it stops being true.</b> If everyone stops believing in a bank, they will all rush to get their money out, and the bank won’t have it, and their lack of belief will be retrospectively justified. Whereas <b>if they had kept believing, their belief would also have been justified.</b></bq> <bq>Banking is a way for people collectively to make long-term, risky bets without noticing them, a way to pool risks so that everyone is safer and better-off. You and I put our money in the bank because it is “money in the bank,” it is very safe, and we can use it tomorrow to pay rent or buy a sandwich. And then the bank goes around making 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans: <b>Homeowners could never borrow money from me for 30 years, because I might need the money for a sandwich tomorrow, but they can borrow from us collectively because the bank has diversified that liquidity risk among lots of depositors.</b></bq> <bq><b>Actual confidence in banks, in the US in 2023, is not just “well I am sure the nice people down at the bank know what they are doing,”</b> but also some version of “I am sure that the regulators are keeping an eye on the banks, and that the government will try to save the banks if anything goes too wrong, and that the government can print dollars so it has the capacity to save the banks.”</bq> <bq><b>Banking is a necessarily social business</b>, banks are interconnected, and the best and biggest bank is only as good as confidence in the broad banking system. <b>You can’t “go big or go home”; even Jamie Dimon has to care about the health of his less competent competitors.</b> If you blitzscale the best food-delivery startup and drive all the other food-delivery startups out of business, you win; <b>if you build the best bank and other banks start going out of business, that is a mixed bag, at best, for you.</b></bq> I find it fascinating that people believe that VCs are altruists because they themselves have said that they were. <bq>David Graeber writes:<bq><b>The political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them.</b> The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, <b>if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France</b>; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic.</bq>Same with banking.</bq> Same with national borders and currency. <bq><b>Bagehot</b> wrote probably the most famous sentence ever written about banking: “<b>Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.</b>” He goes on: “But what we have requires no proof. The whole rests on an instinctive confidence generated by use and years.”</bq> <bq>James Carse: "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. <b>A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.</b>"</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/31/roaming-charges-86/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Spare the AR-15, Spoil the Child</a> <bq>The FDIC estimates that Silicon Valley Bank’s failure will cost the federal deposit insurance fund $20 billion, which would make it the most expensive bank failure in US history, far exceeding the 2008 failure of IndyMac which cost $12.4 billion. The bailout will consume 14% of the insurance fund. The ten largest deposit accounts at SVB held $13.3 billion combined.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1640946592386613251" author="Rafael Shimunov" source="Twitter">It’s always “we live longer our retirement age should be higher” and never “our productivity per hour is multiplying we should retire earlier”</a> <img src="{att_link}productivity_growth_versus_wage_growth.jpeg" href="{att_link}productivity_growth_versus_wage_growth.jpeg" align="none" caption="Productivity Growth Versus Wage Growth" scale="75%"> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/jon_reynolds/2023/03/22/why-the-hell-is-the-us-occupying-syria/" author="Jon Reynolds" source="Antiwar.com">Why the Hell Is the US Occupying Syria?</a> <bq>Ultimately, the more the Syrian conflict sucks up the attention and resources of Syrian allies like Iran and Russia, the greater America’s influence becomes. US intervention in the country has less to do with WMDs, ISIS, or defeating terrorism, and <b>everything to do with weapons sales, oil, regime change, and more specifically, regional power games, global hegemony, and grand imperialist designs shat out by neocon think tanks.</b> And <i>that’s</i> why the hell the US is occupying Syria.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/24/ailing-seniors-need-dignity/" author="Jim Hightower" source="Counterpunch">Ailing Seniors Need Dignity</a> <bq>In 1987, Congress set the minimum for this allowance at a meager $30 a month –- under $8 a week! Congress has not raised it in the 36 years since. And most states still provide only a pittance, despite inflation and monopoly price gouging on practically everything. So, <b>our state and national “leaders” (who freely dole out massive corporate subsidies and tax giveaways to billionaires) are leaving ill seniors with so little spending money that they must ration their toothpaste</b> and scrimp pennies to buy a rare treat from the vending machine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/25/craig-murray-why-would-china-be-an-enemy/" author="Craig Murray" source="Scheer Post">Craig Murray: Why Would China Be an Enemy?</a> <bq>I cannot readily think of any example in history, of a state which achieved the level of economic dominance China has now achieved, that did not seek to use its economic muscle to finance military acquisition of territory to increase its economic resources. In that respect <b>China is vastly more pacific than the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain or any other formerly prominent power.</b></bq> <bq>How many overseas military bases does the U.S. have? And how many overseas military bases does China have? Depending on what you count, <b>the United States has between 750 and 1100 overseas military bases. China has between 6 and 9.</b> The last military aggression by China was its takeover of Tibet in 1951 and 1959. Since that date, we have seen the United States invade with massive destruction Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The United States has also been involved in sponsoring numerous military coups, including military support to the overthrow of literally dozens of governments, many of them democratically elected. It has destroyed numerous countries by proxy, Libya being the most recent example. <b>China has simply no record, for over 60 years, of attacking and invading other countries.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=95404" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Florian Warweg">Die Infantilisierung der deutschen Außenpolitik: Botschafterin in der Ukraine posiert mit „Kuschel-Leo“</a> <bq>Hier agiert eine Diplomatin ohne jeden Filter als pro-ukrainische Aktivistin, also <b>das genaue Gegenteil von dem, was eigentlich die Aufgabe einer Botschafterin wäre.</b> Man fragt sich auch, was so eine Diplomatin macht, wenn ihre nächste Station Russland oder Belarus heißen sollte.</bq> <bq><b>Zahlreiche Südafrikaner fragten die Deutsche Botschaft, wieso diese sich nicht ein einziges Mal zu den von NATO-Staaten geführten Angriffen gegen Irak, Libyen, Syrien, dem Saudi-Krieg im Jemen mit Abertausenden getöteten Zivilisten oder dem israelischen Besatzungsregime in Gaza und der Westbank geäußert hatte.</b> Andere betonten die Unterstützung des Apartheid-Regimes durch die Bundesregierung im Gegensatz zur Sowjetunion, die die Anti-Apartheid-Aktivisten des ANC unter Führung von Nelson Mandela sowie allgemein den antikolonialen Befreiungskampf in Afrika unterstützt habe.</bq> <bq><b>Bundesdeutsche Diplomaten wechseln spätestens alle fünf Jahre komplett Funktion und Land.</b> Auf dieser Grundlage kann man weder eine profunde Länder- und Regionsexpertise erwerben noch die jeweiligen Landessprachen adäquat lernen.</bq> <bq>Im Gegenzug dazu spezialisieren sich beispielsweise russische Diplomaten immer auf eine Region und einen Sprachraum. Bei DDR-Diplomaten war es ähnlich. Der Unterschied ist eklatant. <b>Trifft man auf russische oder auch ehemalige DDR-Diplomaten, so sind diese fast ausnahmslos in der Lage, sich fließend in der jeweiligen Landessprache ihres Einsatzgebietes zu unterhalten</b> – egal ob es sich um Spanisch, Arabisch oder sogar Mandarin handelt. Bei Diplomaten des Auswärtigen Amtes ist dies, von Englisch abgesehen, nur äußerst selten der Fall, mit den entsprechenden Auswirkungen.</bq> <bq>Die Art und Weise, wie Fischer in seiner Zeit als Außenminister <b>alte Kumpels und Mitarbeiter ohne jede Befähigung für den diplomatischen Dienst in hohen Positionen des Auswärtigen Amts unterbrachte</b>, würde ein ganzes (noch ungeschriebenes) Sachbuch füllen.</bq> Geht genau so in den U.S.A. <bq>Weder Staatsministerin Katja Keul noch Staatsministerin Anna Lührmann, ganz zu schweigen von Staatsminister Tobias Lindner, haben <b>außer ihrem Grünen-Parteibuch eine Qualifikation für ihre aktuellen Führungsposten im Auswärtigen Amt vorzuweisen.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/23/ptlz-m23.html" source="WSWS" author="Alex Lantier">Macron brazenly defends decision to impose pension cuts without parliamentary vote</a> <bq>He is trampling public opinion underfoot to impose the diktat of the banks, diverting tens of billions of euros from pensions to bank bailouts and the military build-up for war with Russia. <b>His actions have torn the “democratic” veil off the state, which is a naked dictatorship of the capitalist oligarchy that impoverishes the masses via presidential fiat and police violence.</b></bq> <bq>According to Macron’s argument, being elected president means that until the next elections, one is free to trample the will of the people underfoot. <b>Mass protests with overwhelming popular support must bow, in this view, to diktat of the president and his hordes of thousands of heavily-armed riot police.</b></bq> <bq>Macron is raising military spending by nearly 100 billion euros over the rest of the decade, while <b>leaving his billionaire backers like Bernard Arnault at a zero percent effective tax rate.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/22/patrick-lawrence-biden-and-the-icc-a-new-level-of-farce/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Biden and the ICC: 'A New Level of Farce'</a> <bq>We can have a stable world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter or other such instruments of international law, or we can have the American imperium, but we cannot have both.</bq> <bq>Conflict Observatory is not interested in war crimes in Ukraine; it is interested in Russian war crimes—another matter altogether. And since <b>we have had no impartial, on-the-ground investigations of any of the countless allegations of Russian war crimes</b>, this seems a presumptuous, not to say prejudicial, statement of purpose.</bq> <bq><b>Conflict Observatory claims to operate as a nongovernmental organization, but it is a non–NGO “NGO” funded by the State Department.</b> So much for Conflict Observatory’s claim to conduct disinterested inquiries. It did no on-the-ground research for its report on Russian “abductions,” no interviews with parents, children, officials, or anyone else, and never went anywhere near the 40 or so “re-education camps”—that freighted Cold War term—it says Russia runs. Instead, <b>it skates around social media and relies otherwise on “open source” research and press reports, including Ukrainian press reports.</b></bq> <bq><b>Conflict Observatory bears all the marks—its focus, its funding, its method—of a reprise of the Bellingcat ruse</b>, which is nothing more than a generator of propagandistic nonsense whose funding traces to NATO and various intelligence agencies.</bq> <bq>[...] given the sleazy appearance of Conflict Observatory as the main disseminator of the abduction story, and the sleazy, behind-the-curtain conduct of the Western powers prior to the ICC’s action last week, <b>it looks to me as if evacuations became kidnappings when Western propagandists got to work in The Hague over the past few months.</b></bq> <bq><b>A year after the court began operating came the American invasion of Iraq, the casualties of up to a million, the Abu Ghraib atrocities, and so on. No charges have ever been brought.</b> Ditto, as John Whitbeck notes in his excellent blog , in the matter of Israeli conduct toward Palestinians, the illegal settlements, etc.: No charges, no warrants, no trials.</bq> <bq>Hazzard recounted how the U.S. imported its Cold War anti–Communist freak show into the U.N. onward from the organization’s very first years. So began Washington’s effort to neuter the whole of the organization in the cause of American preeminence—<b>“global leadership” as we have persuaded ourselves imperial ambition is rightfully called.</b></bq> <bq><b>What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.</b> Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/22/seymour-hersh-the-cover-up/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">The Cover-Up</a> <bq>Gas prices, reflecting the mild winter in Europe, have now fallen back to roughly a quarter of the October peak, but they are still between two and three times pre-crisis levels and are more than three times current US rates. <b>Over the last year, German and other European manufacturers closed their most energy-intensive operations, such as fertilizer and glass production, and it’s unclear when, if ever, those plants will reopen.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/21/patrick-lawrence-trump-the-stormy-deep-state/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Trump & the Stormy Deep State</a> <bq>Trump tells us now he wants to see a major overhaul of the Pentagon, the national-security apparatus and the intelligence agencies.<bq><b>President Biden has brought us closer to World War III than we have ever been</b>,” Trump asserts. “Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine continues, we risk global war. <b>We must be absolutely clear that our objective is to immediately have a total cessation of hostilities. We need peace without delay.</b></bq>And then:<bq>We have to finish the process of fundamentally revaluing NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission. Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.</bq>Then a pause for effect, and this:<bq><b>The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably more than anything else ourselves.</b></bq>Not to simplify matters unduly, but now you know why the New York District Attorney’s office is about to issue a warrant for Trump’s arrest on felony charges.</bq> So these quotes seem to be real (as far as I can tell in this topsy-turvy, deep-fake world). The video is linked below. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qDE2MJEmSs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3qDE2MJEmSs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Forbes Breaking News" caption="JUST IN: Trump Warns 'We Have Never Been Closer To World War III' And 'Nuclear Armageddon'"> I don't watch Trump a lot, but I'm kind of surprised to see him reading from a script. He looks like he's in a hostage situation. The words, as quoted above, impart an important meaning, but it's hard to take him seriously because I can't believe he wrote any of this---so it's hard to know whether he believes any of it, whether it's part of his core principles. He has, historically, been very isolationist. But he has also, historically, changed his opinion like a flag in a windstorm. At any rate, he has no idea how to pronounce the word <iq>cessation</iq>. He thinks it sounds like "secession". Read into that what you will. 🙃 <bq>[...] soon enough The Donald falls off the deep end, as is his wont. Before you know it the antiwar, anti–NATO, anti-anti–Russia candidate is on about “the collapse of the nuclear family” and other such social ills: “It’s the Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, gender and the environment.” <b>For the record, I do not think any public figure in America who trades in this kind of paranoid rhetoric should rise above the level of under-assistant third selectman in a town of no more than 600 residents.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/20/iraq-20-years-scott-ritter-disarmament-the-fundamental-lie/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">Disarmament, the Fundamental Lie</a> <bq>This program resulted in the failed coup attempt in June 1996 that used UNSCOM as its operational cover—the coup failed, the Special Activities Staff ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM, and we inspectors were left holding the bag. <b>The Iraqis had every right to be concerned that UNSCOM inspections were being used to target their president because, the truth be told, they were.</b></bq> <bq>Nowhere in Powell’s presentation to the Security Council, or in any of his efforts to recast that presentation as a good intention led astray by bad intelligence, does the reality of regime change factor in. <b>Regime change was the only policy objective of three successive U.S. presidential administrations—Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.</b></bq> <bq>Powell’s speech was a last-gasp effort to use the story of Iraqi WMD for the purpose it was always intended—to facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. In this light, <b>Colin Powell’s speech was one of the greatest successes in C.I.A. history.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-lords-of-chaos" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Lords of Chaos</a> <bq>There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. <b>Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide</b>, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.</bq> <bq><b>Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat.</b> The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. <b>The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/27/tjxs-m27.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Joint Chiefs Chairman: Record military budget “prepares us to fight” China</a> <bq>Even as they made clear the US is preparing for war with China, the two military leaders argued that US intentions were peaceful, because they merely sought to impose the Washington’s will through the threat of violence, and would only resort to violence if threats did not work. “Preparation for war and deterrence is extraordinarily expensive, but it’s not as expensive as fighting a war,” Milley said. “This budget prevents war and prepares us to fight it if necessary.” <b>This argument, repeated over and over by the advocates of US military rearmament, asserts that the more money the United States spends on brandishing weapons at those it seeks to compel to do its bidding through threats, the less likely the actual use of those weapons will be.</b></bq> <bq>Milley continued by arguing that historians would look back at this century and ask, “what was the relationship between United States and China? Did it end up in a war or not?” <b>He added, “What we see in China … the greatest growth and wealth of any country ... This is an enormous growth in wealth and an enormous shift in power globally.” He continued, “It is incumbent upon us to make sure that we remain number one at all times.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/26/chris-hedges-the-donald-trump-problem/" author="Chris Hedges" source="Scheer Post">Chris Hedges: The Donald Trump Problem</a> <bq>The Donald Trump problem is the same as the Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced to resign under the threat of impeachment, it wasn’t for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal use of the CIA and other federal agencies to spy upon, intimidate, harass and destroy radicals, dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down because he targeted other members of the ruling political and economic establishment. <b>Once Nixon, like Trump, attacked the centers of power, the media was unleashed to expose abuses and illegalities it had previously minimized or ignored.</b></bq> <bq>As Edward Herman and Chomsky point out in their book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:<bq>The answer is clear and concise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. <b>This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.</b></bq></bq> <bq><b>The most serious crimes are those that are normalized by the power elite, regardless of who initiated them.</b> George W. Bush may have started the wars in the Middle East, but Barack Obama maintained and expanded them. Obama’s crowning achievement may have been the Iran nuclear deal, but Biden, his former vice president, hasn’t reversed Trump’s trashing of it, nor has he reversed the decision by Trump to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in violation of international law.</bq> <bq>[Trump], too, is personally and politically corrupt. But he is also impulsive, bigoted, inept and ignorant. His baseless conspiracy theories, vulgarity and absurd antics are an embarrassment to the established power elite in the two ruling parties. [Trump] <b>is difficult, unlike Biden, to control. He has to go, not because he is a criminal, but because he is not trusted by the ruling crime syndicate to manage the firm.</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/people-can-win" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">People Can Win</a> <bq><b>We don’t have to concede to a future of always being at war somewhere abroad, and with each other at home.</b> We don’t have to put up with a government that doesn’t tell us anything. Most of all, we can go back to enjoying life, on our own terms, without stressing over an endless succession of panics invented by politically insecure losers. We can do so much better, and we will, because this place is ours to run, a fact the singing censors should never have let us remember.</bq> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjLk5pNn2Js" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tjLk5pNn2Js" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Nerdwriter" caption="Why Sargent Painted Outside The Lines"> A paean to the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singer_Sargent" source="Wikipedia">John Singer Sargent</a>. <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/sweet-smelling-lies" source="Lapham's Quarterly" author="Mark Twain" date="1884">Sweet-Smelling Lies</a> <bq>We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. <b>Look at the candidates whom we loathe one year and are afraid to vote against the next</b>; whom we cover with unimaginable filth one year and fall down on the public platform and worship the next—and keep on doing it until <b>the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year’s evidence brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year’s.</b></bq> <bq>Was he sincere? Yes—by that time; and therein lies the pathos of it all, the hopelessness of it all. <b>It shows at what trivial cost of effort a man can teach himself to lie, and learn to believe it, when he perceives, by the general drift, that that is the popular thing to do.</b> Does he believe his lie yet? Oh, probably not; he has no further use for it. It was but a passing incident; he spared to it the moment that was its due, then hastened back to the serious business of his life.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated" source="SubStack" author="Freddie deBoer">Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias</a> <bq>[...] <b>individual students have their own natural or intrinsic level of academic potential, which we have no reason to believe we can dramatically change.</b> I believe that we can change large group disparities in education (such as the racial achievement gap) by addressing major socioeconomic inequalities through government policy. But even after we eliminate racial or gender gaps, there will be wide differences between individual students, regardless of pedagogy or policy. <b>When Black students as a group score at parity with white students, there will still be large gaps within the population of Black students or white or any other group you can name, and we have no reliable interventions to make the weakest perform like the strongest.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>an educational ideology that insists that every student is a budding genius whose potential waits to be unlocked by a dedicated teacher – and which holds teachers to that unachievable standard.</b> From the right, they’re subject to “no excuses” culture, the constant insistence from the education reform movement that student failures are the result of lazy and feckless teachers; from the left, they’re subject to a misguided egalitarianism that <b>mistakes the fact that every child is important and deserves to be nurtured for the idea that every child has perfectly equal potential.</b></bq> <bq>[...] precisely because everyone has a different level of academic potential and this level is not chosen or under the control of the individual, we should concentrate our efforts on building a far more redistributive social safety net rather than continuing to bash our heads against the wall in the classroom. <b>Look at how remarkably effective Social Security is at bringing senior citizens out of poverty. Why hang our hopes on eradicating poverty and racial inequality on the entirely unproven mechanism of education when we could just give people money?</b></bq> <bq>It's hard to think of a better example of optimism bias than the fact that people still talk about an educational miracle in <b>New Orleans</b>, thanks to a switch to an all-charter system, when those <b>charter schools are absolutely riddled with failure.</b></bq> <bq>The United States spends six and a half times per pupil what Vietnam spends, and yet Vietnam performs almost as well as the United States on international educational comparisons. What can explain this dynamic? <b>What headwinds could the United States be facing that would account for essentially equal outcomes at 6.5x the costs?</b></bq> <bq><b>The United Kingdom spends a third again per-student what South Korea does and gets far worse results.</b> You can’t just dismiss these consistent findings.</bq> I'm going to assume he's checked this, but a dollar isn't a dollar if it's misspent. What about scams? What about not really caring about education? Like, for real. What about a difference in the belief that academics improves citizens? The U.S. pours money into bottomless pits, claiming that they just can't understand why people aren't getting better educations, all the while knowing that it's because of crony capitalism siphoning that money out before it can do its purported good. It is serving its primary purpose: to end up in the pockets of the rich and powerful, of the elites. If it happens to help educate a few kids along the way, that's almost purely accidental. The educational system is, like every other large government program in the U.S., a machine for turning public money private. <bq>But <b>there’s no systematic, empirically-verified explanation of what spending “wisely” means</b>; if there was, states would be doing it. And for the record, there has been no sudden improvement in learning metrics in the decade or so that this new research on expenditures and performance first started appearing.</bq> Yeah, sure, but see above: we may not know what spending wisely is, but we should be able to tell whether we're spending money on the actual thing that we're saying that we're spending it on. If I claim to be going grocery shopping for my family and I come home with a case of Jack Daniels, then there's no case to be made that I spent the money wisely on "food for the family". We know <i>some</i> things. What about an absolute love for scams? For blowing money upward to friends and cronies? <hr> <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-a-philosopher-on-drugs/" source="Wired" author="Justin E.H. Smith">This Is a Philosopher on Drugs</a> <bq>[...] <b>perfectly sober grown-up philosophers understood full well that the reports our senses give us of the physical world hardly settle the matter of what reality in itself is like.</b> The problem is ancient but was sharpened in the early work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, who together articulated a cluster of problems around the concept of “sense-data.”</bq> <bq>But if we have to take account of what the perceiver brings to the instance of perception in order to make any sense at all of what perception is, then <b>it would seem to follow that perception should also be of interest to philosophers when there is no external object at all</b>—or at most a hallucination of one.</bq> <bq>No one seems more pathetic to me, now, in their own cluelessness, than <b>the self-styled “realists” who prejudicially and without any grounds go on supposing that they have a firm grasp of concepts like “nature,” “matter,” “being,” “thing,” “world,” “self,”</b> that this grasp flows directly from their acceptance of the plain evidence of reason buttressed by empirical discovery, and that the question of how many kinds of being there are, and of the nature of these beings, is one that has been definitively settled over the past few centuries of naturalistic inquiry.</bq> <bq>But are any of these lucubrations to be taken at all seriously? Or do they just describe how the world appears to one sorry fellow who’s got a “brain on drugs”? (Readers of a certain age will at this point picture an egg in a frying pan.) Well yes, of course it’s a brain on drugs, but this just returns us to the original problem: <b>Your brain is always on drugs. That is, there is always a neurochemical correlate to any of your conscious perceptions whatsoever.</b></bq> <bq>The undrugged mind may be more reliable in certain respects, since it is less likely to lead you to try to fly off your high-rise balcony, and it is better able to help you stay focused on present dangers and tasks necessary for survival. But <b>this in no way means that the representations it gives you of the world are truer.</b></bq> They just happen to have historically led to more societally useful or valued output. It is only once we have the luxury of not only having our needs covered but barely even being aware of what those needs are that we can explore further. Some will explore while others will necessarily be making sure that the toilet flushes. Don't lose sight of or stop appreciating that. The annoying part comes when these intrepid individuals, comfortable in their entitlement, will ask why we hadn't always done things the better way that the luxury afforded by their entitled position has enabled them to see is perhaps a better way forward for all of us. Humbleness and patience are required when trying to explain to those of us trying to feed, not only ourselves, but you, that we should stop worrying about the arrow of time because it doesn't even really exist man. <bq>Leibniz nonetheless was able to arrive at the conclusion that the only meaningful sense of the verb “to be,” as he put it, is “to have something analogous to the ‘I.’” That is, <b>there is no world but the community of subjects, some of them human but most of them something else entirely.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q&t=9279s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/axuGfh4UR9Q&t=9279s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Machine Learning Street Talk" caption="#78 - Prof. NOAM CHOMSKY (Special Edition)"> These guys ask Chomsky about everything under the sun and he delivers answer after answer. His delivery is completely suspect, but they claim to have reconstructed his voice from extremely damaged video. The <a href="https://whimsical.com/mlst-chomsky-transcript-WgFJLguL7JhzyNhsdgwATy">MLST: Chomsky Transcript</a> is extremely detailed and available online. <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/kErHiET5YPw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="WebCamp Zagreb" caption="Maciej Ceglowski - Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (Keynote)"> <bq>Argument from Slavic pessimism: We can't build anything right. <img src="{att_link}interlockingdrawers.jpg" href="{att_link}interlockingdrawers.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> How are we supposed to build a fixed, morally stable thing when we can't even build a webcam?</bq> <bq>This may upset some of my students at MIT, but <b>one of my concerns is that it's been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around Al, and they're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings.</b> A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized Al, we wouldn't have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/03/30/elon-musk-andrew-yang-and-steve-wozniak-propose-an-a-i-pause-its-a-bad-idea-and-wont-work-anyway/" author="Ronald Bailey" source="Reason">Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Steve Wozniak Propose an A.I. 'Pause.' It's a Bad Idea and Won't Work Anyway.</a> <bq>Human beings are really, really terrible at foresight—especially apocalyptic foresight. Hundreds of millions of people did not die from famine in the 1970s; 75 percent of all living animal species did not go extinct before the year 2000; and "war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens" did not happen since global petroleum production failed to peak in 2006.</bq> Sure, sure, let's name all of the times that Cassandra cried out needlessly, but not mention, just for a tiny example, the time we all just rushed headlong into inventing nuclear weapons and then had to live with that fucking disaster for the next ... going on 100 years now. Seriously, is there anyone sane who wouldn't like to take back that invention? Can we seriously not see how inventions can make everything worse in a way that closes off an infinite continuum of better possibilities? Can you imagine how much good we could have done with the trillions of dollars of productivity and output that we invested into those weapons programs? And to those who are literally shitting their pants in excitement, ready to jump on this argument and scream "but what about all of the awesome technology we got out of it?" I say fuck you very much because you are so limited in your vision that you can't even conceive of any human achievement except as a by-product of the desire to slaughter millions of people at once or to make a handful of people extremely rich. We would have built cool things even if we'd decided never to build nuclear weapons. Now we have them and they are a giant, stinking albatross around our necks, wasting energy and effort, promulgating fear and dread, and generally just distracting humanity from doing more worthwhile things with its time and creative capacity and wonderful intelligence. It's like having a ton of debt and a dead-end job. Instead of being able to focus on your art or helping people, you're forced to spend all of your time worrying about how to eat. Atomic weapons are like that. Instead of people being able to feed and clothe and help other people, we're all forced to spend our resources on building newer and better weapons---because we think the other guy's gonna do it first. It's an absolute clown-show and it has to stop. <hr> <a href="https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-practical-stuff" author="Ethan Mollick" source="One Useful Thing">How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide</a> <bq>Some things to worry about: In a bid to respond to your answers, it is very easy for the AI to “hallucinate” and generate plausible facts. It can generate entirely false content that is utterly convincing. Let me emphasize that: AI lies continuously and well. Every fact or piece of information it tells you may be incorrect. <b>You will need to check it all. Particularly dangerous is asking it for math, references, quotes, citations, and information for the internet (for the models that are not connected to the internet).</b> Bing and ChatGPT-4 are better at this. Here is a guide to avoiding hallucinations. The AI also doesn’t explain itself, it only makes you think it does. <b>If you ask it to explain why it wrote something, it will give you a plausible answer that is completely made up. It is not interrogating its own actions, it is just generating text that sounds like it is doing so.</b> This makes understanding biases in the system very challenging, even though those biases almost certainly exist.</bq> <bq>GPT-3.5 is a powerful coding companion. But GPT-4 is next-level. I have been using it to write programs in Python and Unity (programming languages I literally do not know at all!) by just telling it what I want in words: "I need to create an Amazon Echo skill that will flash my hue lights green and blue when I yell party. Can you create it?" It did, and now my lights flash blue and green. <b>It told me what files to download, what websites to go to, and what to do. When there were errors, I just pasted them in and it corrected the code and told me how to fix problems. I didn’t need to know anything.</b> You can code now. Try it.</bq> It really depends what you mean by "coding". There's a spectrum of ability, from people who can't even figure out how to move from one page to another in a phone menu, to people who can write the code that determines how to make the screen look like it's moving from one page to the other. What these tools allow you to do is to be able to more quickly be able to do much more than you could before. If you already knew how to follow five-step instructions to wire two APIs together, then you won't be blown away by this. It's not super-empowering, although it might make you faster if you've never done that particular thing before. If you've literally never looked at the preferences or settings for an app before, then you're going to think this thing has helped you become a God. It's like if you've never really walked anywhere before but then you took methamphetamines and now you can walk 20km without even getting tired. When you sober up, you might wonder whether there are any downsides, but the upside looks tremendous. It's the same with these tools: you <iq>don't need to know anything</iq>, nor will you know anything after you're done---although you might! Maybe you learn something as you're copy/pasting!---but you've got the thing you wanted. I suppose that's cool, if that's all you were after. I suppose if the message <iq>you don't need to know anything</iq> is appealing, then you're in luck, my friend. <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/kayfabe-content-and-podcasts-that" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Kayfabe content and podcasts that don't exist</a> <bq>I just don’t think there’s much we can do about the “AI crisis”. It’s just going to happen. And I think it’s actually very funny that all of these guys (once again, all guys, curious) are <b>imagining some kind of organized global consensus even being possible with regards to something as complicated as the definition of artificial intelligence as we barrel our way into the third year of a still-very-much happening pandemic that people still can’t even agree on how to deal with.</b> I just don’t think there’s any world where humanity comes together to deal with this stuff, which means any advocacy for it is doomed to end in geopolitical conflict and, man, <b>I just don’t think the invention of a slightly better autocomplete app is worth World War 3.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/04/01/what-are-the-bots-doing-to-art/" author="Crispin Sartwell" source="Reason">What Are the Bots Doing to Art?</a> <bq><b>In some ways the tech is unprecedented, but then so were each of these advancements as they occurred.</b> A.I. is an even more capable technology, perhaps the first to make us wonder whether the technology or the person using it is the artist, and it makes use of all the previously accumulated technological advances. But if I were predicting, admittedly a very dicey prospect, I'd predict displacement but not disaster. <b>A.I. is already leading directly to changes of style and content similar to the advent of photography.</b> Honestly, it is leading right now to many repulsive and trivial images, but also to some excellent art.</bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/" author="Simon Willison" source="">AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects</a> <bq>The thing I'm most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT (and GitHub Copilot) save me an enormous amount of "figuring things out" time. For everything <b>from writing a for loop in Bash to remembering how to make a cross-domain CORS request in JavaScript - I don't need to even look things up any more</b>, I can just prompt it and get the right answer 80% of the time. This doesn't just make me more productive: it lowers my bar for when a project is worth investing time in at all. In the past I've had plenty of ideas for projects which I've ruled out because they would take a day - or days, or weeks - of work to get to a point where they're useful. I have enough other stuff to build already! <b>But if ChatGPT can drop that down to an hour or less, those projects can suddenly become viable.</b></bq> In fairness, though, you're still <iq>looking things up,</iq> you're just using an LLM-powered search engine instead. I'm honestly not sure whether <iq>right answer 80% of the time</iq> is any better than searching with DuckDuckGo. It might be faster maybe? Although I find things on vastly disparate and esoteric topics pretty quickly already. I find it hard to believe that ChatGPT could tell me why I'm getting an error 1190 when trying to execute a Windows logon script via GPO any better than the handful of experts whose answers would probably have contributed to its answer anyway. Since ChatGPT can't produce new information or really synthesize it in any realistic manner, doesn't it stand to reason that they less potential input material it has, the less likely that its answer is correct? I mean, what would be the reasoning behind its being able to tell me anything about my personal family tree, for instance? Of course it's just going to make everything up. <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvM2Cmi-YRU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/UvM2Cmi-YRU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Queen & George Michael - Somebody to Love (The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert)" date="1992"> One incredible vocalist paying tribute to another. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc8kTma-36c" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/fc8kTma-36c" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Movieclips" caption="The Running Man (1987) - Captain Freedom's Kills Scene"> As commentator Monwhea Jeng astutely points out, <bq>Imagine trying to convince someone in 1987 that this scene shows a fight between the future governors of Minnesota and California.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCXFCoe2sbc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dCXFCoe2sbc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="ReasonTV" caption="Partisan Post-game"> A post-game interview with the coaches of the Republican and Democrat teams. <h><span id="games">Video Games</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkEOEEKYD0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-lkEOEEKYD0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="IGN" caption="Unreal Engine 5.2 - Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo | State of Unreal 2023"> I'm not loving the truck product-placement, but the technology is gobsmacking. I imagine that what it's generating is going to feel just as generic and bland as the output of today's AIs, but it's probably going to get better, too. At any rate, you've always had very generic areas that hadn't benefitted from an artist's touch. Procedural generation could only go so far and always felt boring. This is next-level procedural generation that blends pretty well with the artist-constructed areas, so it's nicer all-around. Cool 🤙 stuff.